Paul Thomas Anderson’s nearly three hour long Pynchon-adjacent revolutionary drama One Battle After Another is a hit. We here at Aftermath give it our stamp of approval and recommend you see it in the most elaborately large format you can. Isaiah and Chris sat down to chat about what they liked.
(This article contains some spoilers for One Battle After Another)
Isaiah: So, as someone who just watched their first Paul Thomas Anderson film a couple weeks prior in There Will Be Blood, I didn't walk into One Battle After Another with any grand expectations like the rest of the general public. All I knew is it starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, and Benicio del Toro. Assuming you've got more familiarity with PTA, how'd the film measure up for you? Spoilers for me: I rated it a rare five stars on Letterboxd.
Chris: Oh wow, I'm happy for you. You got a ton of great PTA films to watch. I went to film school and so it was kind of impossible to avoid the man's work. Phantom Thread is one of my favorite movies, and he's unimpeachably good with the exception of Licorice Pizza, which exactly half of my friends hated vehemently. He was "working some stuff out" with that one.
For people who have not seen the movie, One Battle After Another is an incredibly loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. Anderson had previously adapted Inherent Vice, which I love, but a lot of people slid off of it. I think he made the right call here because it diverges a lot from the novel.
Isaiah: Ah, didn't know it was based on a book! I wonder if that'll explain some ick feelings I've been seeing from folks. But yeah, the movie---in the barest of terms, follows DiCaprio as a former revolutionary and single father. After roughly 16 years, a military dude played by Sean Penn is back on the hunt for him, putting DiCaprio and his daughter in the crosshairs of a messy (to put it lightly) family drama with a city-wide ICE raid taking place in the background. I basically walked out of the film with the burning thought to add it and Eddington to a time capsule watchlist about how our current administration sucks.
Chris: I agree, although I like it way more than Eddington for reasons that would take too long to get into.
In the movie, Bob (DiCaprio) is a former member of the French 75, which is pretty notably rooted in radical Black politics. His lover, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) sexually humiliates Steven J. Lockjaw (Penn) who becomes obsessed with Perfidia, and this sexual obsession becomes much of the motivating factor in tracking down Bob and his daughter Charlene.
Isaiah: The movie from there is an extended game of cat and mouse as Bob looks for his daughter while Lockjaw tries to kill Bob and track her down. In the midst of all that, Lockjaw is terrorizing this small town and Del Toro's Sensei Sergio helps organize folks to circumvent ICE.
He's the coolest guy ever.
Chris: He's so sick, man. He's so cool he momentarily sells drunk driving as being cool.
Isaiah: I've never seen a film so successfully advertise Modelo. Like every scene Sergio is on sight offering Bob a four pack of beer to help calm down their very stressful situation.
Chris: I believe in the original he's a fucked up DEA agent, but in this he's like a guy who's a karate instructor but secretly the most competent guy he knows. It's really hard to watch this movie and not force analogues from P.T. Anderson's life. Phantom Thread is a wife guy movie, and both that movie and this feel indebted to his marriage to Maya Rudolph, who herself mostly grew up not knowing her mother, Minnie Riperton.
Isaiah: OH, I DIDN'T KNOW THAT. I only knew him as the guy folks confuse for Milla Jovovich's husband.
Chris: Also a wife guy director, but in a totally different way.
Isaiah: I liked the film a lot. It had that kind of riding the line of being funny and stressful in equal measure with some sick-ass camera work. Which, I guess, should go without saying. Folks were clowning on the IMAX poster just being of a road instead of the cliche floating head poster. After seeing the film, they're 100 percent justified in doing so. I've never been more stressed at a camera pointed at a road in my life.
Chris: I saw it in VistaVision, which is a very weird format from the 50s that they revived for The Brutalist where you flip the 35mm negative sideways to get more resolution. The film broke halfway through the screening and I saw a lot of people report similar things, but it looks FANTASTIC.
It is fascinating how current the movie feels. The setting that Anderson uses is a little wonky and surreal on purpose, a little unmoored in time. It envisions a world with a more radical politics than ours (closer to groups in the 70s), but the depiction of fascist ICE agents is just what I see every single day when I look at my phone. It feels like this was pitched last week.
Sean Penn puts in a deranged performance, I was in awe.
Isaiah: Wrestling circles are basically in agreement that Penn could play Vince McMahon in a biopic should Hollywood want one. The teeth sucking grossed me, out but that weird waddle of his is vintage Mr. McMahon.
On that note, there’s one plot point related to him I have a point of contention with if we're good to lightly dive into some spoilers.
Chris: He does the Vince walk! And also yes.
Isaiah: The major thrust of the film is that Bob and Perfidia are very sexually active. Like, will fuck in the middle of setting off a bomb sexual. But all of that plays out after an encounter where Perfidia humiliates Lockjaw basically making him get an erection at gunpoint while rescuing folks in an ICE encampment. This domino effects into him being obsessed with her and coercing her into sex lest Lockjaw ruin their whole operation. Hence the family drama element of Perfidia not really liking her daughter Willa, walking out on Bob, and eventually ratting on the French 75.
The rest of the movie's whole chase is basically Maury with the parentage of Willa being in the balance.
While I found all that drama pretty engrossing, some folks felt that part of the film was off the mark. Basically, One Battle After Another doesn't leave any Black women looking good by the end of it. It's not something I actively thought about while watching it, but I did find the movie routinely being like "kinfolk will sell you out when push comes to shove" to be something worth picking apart. Not necessarily something the movie interrogates, but an interesting aspect of the film nonetheless.
I was wondering, since this is based on a book, if that was an element PTA directly adapted or if this is a case of PTA not being as tapped in to things that give Black folks the ick.
Chris: Yeah, I do agree that there's something really hard to watch about Perfidia's character, and I've seen people echo that statement. I think you're meant to sort of stew in what she did and why she did it, like her identity is meant to be a thing that Willa has to grapple with, but it comes off weird.
There's a part where Junglepussy (played by the rapper of the same name) says "this is some Set It Off shit" in the middle of a robbery, and it's hard not to see him borrowing heavily from that movie.
A big theme of this movie is how the fascist state forces people to turn on each other, to inform, to name names. It happens again and again in the movie, but the movement persists. It's a movie that feels indebted to movies like The Red Circle and The War Is Over, about the intricacies of resistance, but the difference is it's largely meant to be a hopeful message. And I think a running theme is that even if you were complicit with the way the world is, how do you make things right?
Isaiah: Yeah, the film to me didn't necessarily embellish in fetishizing Black women more than play up how people who do so are fucking weird. Kinda in the way that it would make Black people laugh watching all the shit go down with Lockjaw being both cartoony and realistically racist. I think the film also dresses that with its weird underground coven of white racists in the Christmas Adventurers Club. Still, I can see why folks aren't so hot on Black women getting the short end of the stick in tandem with revolutionaries seeming incompetent.
Basically everyone not involved with Sensei comes off as a group of washed revolutionaries or folks who are more likely to rat each other out when the going got tough. There's probably more to that, but I found that to be more interesting than something to necessarily find fault in being represented in the film. I don't necessarily need One Battle After Another to neatly package my politics. If it did, I'd feel more pandered to than anything. So I found even that messiness to be a quality to the film in a way.
Shit happens, people make decisions, and sometimes those are more about self preservation than true allyship. As a nonbinary person, Charlene's nonbinary friend ultimately selling her out was something I leaned forward in my chair from then threw my hands up at. I think filmmakers are at their best when they make those kinds of interesting choices that provoke conversation instead of feeling like a laminated, mass-produced, people-pleasing, cathartic affair.
Chris: Yeah, and there's this implicit element there of their nonbinary friend being the highest risk.
Related to Lockjaw's weird pathology, I had to read The Mass Psychology of Fascism when I reviewed Psycho Patrol R and the one part where Wilhelm Reich (who was a crank) was really cooking is his idea that fascism is the sum of irrational thoughts, and that racism stems from fascism and sexual dysfunction, and that's basically just describing Sean Penn's whole character.
I like how nobody in The Christmas Adventurers Club knows how to talk normally; they all have these weird ways of phrasing shit. Fascism is that cartoonishly evil, these people really do exist and they are currently in charge of the government. And to your point about ambiguity, I think the part that haunts me the most is the tracker Avanti played by Eric Schweig, who gives this incredible, understated performance.
Also, this movie is fucking FUNNY.
Isaiah: Yeah, I was worried when the online chatter from legacy pubs likened DiCaprio's performance to The Big Lebowski but that's entirely fitting. Him basically being the inverse, less a fish out of water thrown into a whole ordeal and more a guy trying his best, was a good bit. I tend to have a better time with movies that don't take themselves too painfully seriously, so One Battle After Another injecting some humor to break up the crushing tension of the film is great. Didn't think PTA would have a good eye for directing that, but seeing as how one of the funniest bits in There Will Be Blood was the whole milkshake scene, it shouldn't surprise me that he had a comedic eye too. High key, not enough folks talk about the actually funniest scene, where Paul Dano talks about God failing to alert him to the recent panic of our economy.
Chris: He does not get enough credit for being funny, I think so often of Phiip Seymour Hoffman in The Master saying "If you already know the answers to your questions then why ask PIG FUCK?"
I also love that DiCaprio is like a revolutionary from another era: He sucks at doing the reading, he does not know how modern society works, but he never stops trying or caring. The scene with his daughter's nonbinary friend could have easily gone off the rails, but it's saved by him being like ‘look, I'm just trying to be POLITE.’
Isaiah: Exactly! I'm not one of those folks saying it's his best performance to date or anything, but it's nice to see that this wasn't a film he seemed to be sleepwalking through doing his usual crashouts at things happening around him. Film had heart and it did so without really centering him as a blanket savior but with Willa reckoning with her place in this fucked-up world.
Also, fun fact, I discovered that her actor, Chase Infiniti, actually graduated a year after me at Columbia College Chicago. Very wild stuff I'll be sure to use as bragging rights in every cinephile circle I'll frequent in the near future. Makes me wonder if I crossed her in the halls or nearly missed each other during Zoom classes for the few film courses I took there. She was great.
Chris: What could have been...
Isaiah: She strikes me as a fellow Devil Dawgs frequenter. Her name being a mix of inspiration from Toy Story's "To infinity and beyond” and Nicole Kidman’s Chase Meridian in Batman Forever is the most gen-z thing anyone will ever hear.
Chris: Goddddd. Yeah, you're right.
Isaiah: Hopefully it'll be her star-making performance in the years to come.
Chris: Yeah she is the breakout here, and like the heart of the movie.
In a movie of messy characters she is one of the few with her head on straight. She does not need her dad to save her or her mom to come out of hiding and that's the point. Despite the limitations of what her parents could give her, Bob's heroism is fundamentally in instilling a moral compass in her even when she has to raise herself. In her heart she wants to be the version of her mom that she was raised on. And that's the thing about kids– you hope that they live up in a better world, to be what you wanted to be, and not make the mistakes that you made.
Isaiah: And at the end of the day, that's really the One Battle After Another, isn't it? Overcoming generational trauma. That and trying to live in a world that abhors your very existence.
